This edited collection, comprised and introduced by Maria Yelenevskaya & Ekaterina Protassova, explores the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘home-making’ among Russian-speaking migrant communities across various temporal and spatial contexts. It focuses on how material culture intersects with identity, language, migration, and belonging. Drawing from ethnographic research—comprising questionnaires, interviews, and images—the chapters in this work employ mixed-method approaches, primarily critical discourse analysis (CDA), pragmalinguistic insights, and sociological frameworks. By centering on Russian diasporas, the book addresses a gap in the largely Western-dominated discourse on diasporans’ homes and material culture.
Structured in ten chapters, the opening section by Kira Kaurinkoski explores Russian refugees and post-Soviet migrants in Greece. It highlights how migrants balance nostalgia with adaptation, using kinship networks and the host community to navigate cultural transitions. This process involves integrating into the host country's architecture, traditions, and language while retaining elements of their original identities. This approach to the emotional and symbolic power of material possessions is explored in other contexts: in United Kingdom by Anna Pechurina (chapter 2), in Japan by Ksenia Golovina (chapter 3), in Finland by Ekaterina Protassova & Kirill Reznik (chapter 4), in Australia by Marika Kalyuga (chapter 5), in San Javier, Uruguay by Gleb Pilipenko (chapter 7), in Israel by Maria Yelenevskaya (chapter 8), in Turkey by Liaisan Şahin (chapter 9). In addition, Sasha Razor explores in chapter 6 the cultural hubs that Russian restaurants represented in Los Angeles between 1920s and 1980s, reflecting ‘Russianness’ while competing with Hollywood's simulacra of Russian culture. Finally, chapter 10 (by Larissa Aronin) synthetizes these interdisciplinary insights, emphasizing the theoretical complexities of ‘home’ and ‘home-making’, as well as the idea of global materialities of multilingualism.
The diasporans’ stories portrayed in this volume share the shifting and multifaceted nature of the concept of ‘home’, navigating the delicate interplay between past and present identities. The migrant home is created, conserved, and narrated by material culture. This volume highlights the role of language in shaping the migrant identity, exploring whether and how it is kept, left behind, or perhaps blended with the host language. Certain elements are particularly relevant in the study of the migrant's language: the linguistic landscape (as dealt with in chapter 7), the use of social media and online communication to keep in touch with one's language and homeland (see chapters 4, 8, and 9), and language teaching in the host country (chapter 7). Furthermore, it is worth highlighting the significance of the interviews and personal stories that make this volume such a valuable and emotional piece of work.
Approaching the interdisciplinarity of ‘home-making’, this book is a useful collection particularly for scholars or enthusiasts interested in material culture, linguistics, sociology, and Russian studies. Through a perspective of cultural and linguistic anthropology, as well as social analysis ethnography, semiotics, and culture geography, this book is a quite significant contribution to understanding the diasporic experience in Russian-speaking contexts, blending diverse methodologies to explore how migrants navigate their identities through material and symbolic means.
